Professor Eugene Ch’ng is Dean of the School of Culture and Creativity, at BNU-HKBU UIC. He is a distinguished scholar in the interdisciplinary domain of digital culture and heritage, and a recognised expert in XR technologies. He presently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality, MIT Press. Professor Ch'ng holds a BA (Hons) in 3D Design for the Built Environment from De Montfort University, UK, and an MSc in IT from Multimedia University Malaysia. Notably, he earned the Best PhD Award in 2007 from the Electronics, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has led pioneering centres such as the IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre and the Digital Humanities Hub at the University of Birmingham (2011-2013), and the NVIDIA Joint-Lab on Mixed Reality at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China from 2016 to 2023 as founding director. His contributions have been instrumental in advancing digital technologies for cultural heritage, which garnered funding awards from the UK, Europe, and China. He has published over 135 articles, among which were two significant volumes of work ‘Visual Heritage in the Digital Age’ and ‘Visual Heritage: Digital Approaches in Heritage Science’ that have contributed to the global discourse on the application of scientific and digital methodologies in cultural heritage. Professor Eugene Ch’ng was named among the top 2% most-cited scientists in the world by Stanford University this year. Address: University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Social communication around art and cultural heritage objects occurs mostly on location in the mu... more Social communication around art and cultural heritage objects occurs mostly on location in the museums and between in-group acquaintances. Such discussions are often brief as competing array of displays and time constraints propel the social arrangement of groups of visitors forward to the next object. Discussions are more often than not fleeting and superficial, and rarely expand beyond the boundary of the group. We postulate that the interactivity afforded by augmented reality that allows the inspection of cultural heritage objects projected onto the real environment of users can be a better experience in terms of depth of viewing. We developed a mobile augmented reality application that allows multiuser interaction and propose that discussions that occur around cultural heritage objects can be replicated, and that such discussions can be expanded beyond in-groups. We conducted hypotheses testing across 10 groups of 30 participants to investigate if aspects of social communication can be facilitated or impeded by the perceived realism or artificiality of objects and explore which features of Social AR are more important for communication. The research aims to understand how social communication would work for AR when co-viewing heritage objects. The results have implications for necessitating cross-border and cross-cultural exchanges in an increasingly virtually connected world.
The universality of heritage carries the important connotation that it belongs to everyone. This ... more The universality of heritage carries the important connotation that it belongs to everyone. This universal value assigned to cultural heritage necessitates that it is international in nature, and that citizens of every country regardless of their background are given access and can learn from it. In this research, we investigate the web accessibility of the national-level museums of China that are ranked top three. We formulated a set of research questions and hypotheses that test assumptions, looking into the accessibility awareness in practice across 145 museums. We crawled a total of 113 web specific variables such as the number of objects in the collections, graded precious artefacts, and annual visitors. Other independent variables include summary accessibility errors such as contrast errors, alert errors, feature errors, structure, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and social media accounts. Details of the errors in each of these categories would form the majority of the remaining data points. The findings were surprisingly, not according to our original assumptions. Museums would stand to benefit from this study, which will in turn improve accessibility and inclusivity, and thus provide the international community with access to the rich collections of over 10 million cultural heritage objects scattered across the country.
Springer Series on Cultural Computing book series (SSCC), 2022
How we understand our shared and individual heritage, interpret and disseminate that knowledge is... more How we understand our shared and individual heritage, interpret and disseminate that knowledge is increasingly central to contemporary society. The emerging context for such development is the field of heritage science. Inherently interdisciplinary, and involving both the Arts and Humanities, engineering, conservation and the digital sciences, the development of heritage science is a driver for change; socially, economically and technically. This book has gathered contributions from leading researchers from across the world and provides a series of themed contributions demonstrating the theoretical, ethical, methodological and technical methods which lie at the heart of heritage science. Archaeology, conservation, museology, the arts, forensic sciences, and heritage management are represented through collaborative research with specialists in applied technologies including object and terrestrial laser scanning, multi-spectral imaging, visualisation, GIS and 3D-printing. Together, the chapters present important case studies to demonstrate the recent advances and best practise within the discipline, highlighting the value of digital transformation across the heritage community that includes objects, monuments, sites and landscapes spanning two million years of natural and cultural history from all over the world. Visual Heritage: Digital Approaches in Heritage Science aimed at a broad academic and practice-led readership, which extends across many disciplines and will be of considerable value to scholars, practitioners, and students working within heritage and computer science at all levels. The content, which applies heritage science across two million years of cultural history will be appreciated by a general audience, as well as those wishing simply to explore the vast range of potential technical applications across all the disciplines represented in the book.
Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, 2022
In recent years, many Asian cities have invested in the digitalization of cultural heritage, and ... more In recent years, many Asian cities have invested in the digitalization of cultural heritage, and participatory digital archiving platforms have also been developed. These innovations are widely lauded for their potential to rejuvenate heritage, reach out to youths in the public domain, and fostering participation and interaction through engaging activities. While the intention to leave a heritage as a legacy for the younger generation has always been the foundational objective of heritage policies, young publics are rarely envisaged as stakeholders in top-level planning of heritage strategies. The special issue call submissions that provide a better understanding of how digital tools can be used for mobilising activities core to cultural heritage and within the process, engage both institutions and grassroots communities such as young people as stakeholders. The special issue aims to both address and reflects upon the myriad opportunities and challenges that the use of new technologies have raised in the process of preserving cultural heritage in Asia so as to leave a legacy for our new generation. Especially focusing on the young generation as important heritage stakeholders and to investigate their role in the articulation between heritage and sustainable development. Questions for the special issue are included but not limited to: What are the necessary social, economic, and political conditions for leveraging the power of digital technology that can engage with the younger generations? What are the limits of audience interaction and participation in the digitalization of cultural heritage? How do young generations interact with cultural heritage within virtual and physical spaces? What can we do to empower and facilitate cooperation between governments, cultural and academic institutions in a way that engages with the young generations in digital heritage projects? What are the implications of such collaborations for heritage preservation and sustainable development? Submission • Closing date of submission window: 5th July 2022 • Scheduled publication date: May 2023 • Full papers should be submitted through the JCHMSD ScholarOne Manuscripts and will be subject to the peer review procedures. Please register and access: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jchmsd • Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jchmsd?_ga=2.208294416.383106498.164 4286268-775555333.1612172152#author-guidelines
Our article maps the well-being of the adoption and use of digital technologies in museums in Chi... more Our article maps the well-being of the adoption and use of digital technologies in museums in China. Digital technologies used here are termed ‘cultural technology’ in top-level national policies for the creative cultural industry, with culture and heritage at the core of all such activities. Our investigation aims to understand the present state of adoption and use of cultural technologies with the goal of identifying limitations so as to provide a roadmap for the informed design and development of museum-based digital exhibits that are appropriate for visitors. Whilst our study is focused on China's museums, our evaluation model and lessons learned can be used as comparative studies for museums globally. This highlights the novelty of our article, for the scale of which we carried out our evaluation has never been conducted before. We travelled 22 sites over 15 cities and collected over 800 samples of data. We evaluated 36 digital systems used by over 800 visitors and observed how users interacted and engaged with the systems with a record of 21 variables related to the length of interaction, engagement, quality of contents and types of systems, age groups, sexes, and the number of participants and whether they were individuals or in groups. Our investigation revealed important findings in both digital systems and visitor engagement.
Special Issue on Arts, Aesthetics, and Performance in VR and Telepresence, PRESENCE: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 26(2), MIT Press , 2017
This article presents a detailed design, development and implementation of a Mixed Reality Art-Sc... more This article presents a detailed design, development and implementation of a Mixed Reality Art-Science collaboration project which was exhibited during Darwin’s bicentenary exhibition at Shrewsbury, England. As an artist-led project the concerns of the artist were paramount, and this article presents Shift-Life as part of an on-going exploration into the parallels between the non-linear human thinking process and computation using semantic association to link items into ideas, and ideas into holistic concepts. Our art explores perceptions and states of mind as we move our attention between the simulated world of the computer and the real-world we inhabit, which means that any viewer engagement is participatory rather than passive. From a Mixed Reality point of view, the lead author intends to explore the convergence of the physical and virtual, therefore the formalisation of the Mixed Reality system, focusing on the integration of artificial life, ecology, physical sensors and participant interaction through an interface of physical props. It is common for digital media artists to allow viewers to activate a work either through a computer screen via direct keyboard or mouse manipulation, or through immersive means to activate their work, for “Shift-Life” the artist was concerned with a direct ‘relational’ approach where viewers would intuitively engage with the installation’s everyday objects, and with each other, to fully experience the piece. The Mixed Reality system is mediated via physical environmental sensors, which affect the virtual environment and autonomous agents, which in turn reacts and is expressed as virtual pixels projected onto a physical surface. The tangible hands-on interface proved to be instinctive, attractive and informative on many levels, delivering a good example of collaboration between the Arts and Science.
Archaeology is a broad church and its role as a “two culture” discipline is frequently cited. Th... more Archaeology is a broad church and its role as a “two culture” discipline is frequently cited. This position at the interface of the arts and sciences remains central to archaeological activity but there have been significant changes in the structure of archaeology and its relationship to society overall. The growth of heritage science, in particular, is increasingly driving change and development within archaeology at a national and international level. This paper discusses these developments in relation to the author’s own research trajectory and discusses the significance of such change.
Abstract—The first recorded crowdsourcing activity was in 1714 [1], with intermittent public even... more Abstract—The first recorded crowdsourcing activity was in 1714 [1], with intermittent public event occurrences up until the millennium when such activities become widespread, spanning multiple domains. Crowdsourcing, however, is relatively novel as a methodology within virtual environment studies, in archaeology, and within the heritage domains where this research is focused. The studies that are being conducted are few and far between in comparison to other areas. This paper aims to develop a recent concept in crowdsourcing work termed ‘crowd behaviour mining’ [2] using virtual environments, and to develop a unique concept in crowdsourcing activities that can be applied beyond the case studies presented here and to other domains that involve human behaviour as independent variables. The case studies described here use data from experiments involving separate heritage projects and conducted during two Royal Society Summer Science Exhibitions, in 2012 and 2015 respectively. ‘Crowd Behaviour Mining’ analysis demonstrated a capacity to inform research in respect of potential patterns and trends across space and time as well as preferences between demographic user groups and the influence of experimenters during the experiments.
Twitter Sentiment Analysis can be a useful vehicle to provide deep insight into how citizens feel... more Twitter Sentiment Analysis can be a useful vehicle to provide deep insight into how citizens feel, thus it enables Governments across the world to track the public’s political views. Various Sentiment Analysis techniques have been proposed in recent years, and automatic annotation of training sets using an emoticon heuristic has been proved useful. As emojis are becoming increasingly popular in online written communication, this research investigates the feasibility of an emoji training heuristic for Twitter Sentiment Analysis of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Multinomial Naïve Bayes classifier is used to build a sentiment classifier, which employs a variety of features. The results demonstrate the emoji heuristic together with our methodological framework achieve satisfying performance. We also apply our model to real-world presidential election tweets and present how the public views the top election candidates.
To manage supply chain efficiently, e-business organizations need to understand their sales effec... more To manage supply chain efficiently, e-business organizations need to understand their sales effectively. Previous research has shown that product review plays an important role in influencing sales performance, especially review volume and rating. However, limited attention has been paid to understand how other factors moderate the effect of product review on online sales. This study aims to confirm the importance of review volume and rating on improving sales performance, and further examine the moderating roles of product category, answered questions, discount and review usefulness in such relationships. By analyzing 2,939 records of data extracted from Amazon.com using a big data architecture, it is found that review volume and rating have stronger influence on sales rank for search product than for experience product. Also, review usefulness significantly moderates the effects of review volume and rating on product sales rank. In addition, the relationship between review volume and sales rank is significantly moderated by both answered questions and discount. However, answered questions and discount do not have significant moderation effect on the relationship between review rating and sales rank. The findings expand previous literature by confirming important interactions between customer review features and other factors, and the findings provide practical guidelines to manage e-businesses. This study also explains a big data architecture and illustrates the use of big data technologies in testing theoretical framework.
[Conclusion to Editor's Introduction] Optical scanning technology, remote sensing, sophisticated ... more [Conclusion to Editor's Introduction] Optical scanning technology, remote sensing, sophisticated 3D modeling tools and developments in efficient computer graphics rendering pipelines have fuelled worldwide virtual reconstructions of tangible heritage. Such needs prompted funding councils and agencies to reserve and distribute resources in order to support the development of technologies and methodologies that made high impact research possible. The visualization and real-time interactive aspects of such developments have since provided great opportunities for tangible heritage to be analyzed, interpreted and experienced via their virtual representations (Ch’ng, Gaffney & Chapman, 2013), with an observed shift towards new paradigms of investigation that informs academic research, such as complex systems science and agent-based modeling (Ch’ng, Gaffney & Chapman, 2013). However, in reviewing the present state of virtual heritage research, we realize that there remains a gap in the discipline. Most heritage applications lacked a sense of immersion in terms of ‘livingness’, life, behavior and cultural agents in the virtual environments, and there has not been any progression in such developments since a decade ago. Reconstructions of heritage as elaborate virtual manifestations of materiality are without life, if they are without representations of life and behavior as intangible heritage representations in the virtual environment. Perhaps it is time for the heritage community to lead, by defining genuine problems within their domains, working with the science and engineering disciplines so that the real value of heritage can be realized in the present day.
This study aims to investigate if online reviews (e.g. valence and volume), online promotional st... more This study aims to investigate if online reviews (e.g. valence and volume), online promotional strategies (e.g. free delivery and discounts) and sentiments from user reviews can help predict product sales. Design/methodology/approach: We designed a big data architecture and deployed Node.JS agents for scraping the Amazon.com pages using asynchronous Input/Output calls. The completed web crawling and scraping datasets were then preprocessed for sentimental and neural network analysis. The neural network was employed to examine which variables in our study are important predictors of product sales. Findings: This study found that although online reviews, online promotional strategies and online sentiments can all predict product sales, some variables are more important predictors than others. We found that the interplay effects of these variables become more important variables than the individual variables themselves. For example, online volume interactions with sentiments and discounts are more important than the individual predictors of discounts, sentiments or online volume. Originality/value: This study designed big data architecture, in combination with sentimental and neural network analysis that can facilitate future business research for predicting product sales in an online environment. This study also employed a predictive analytic approach (e.g. neural network) to examine the variables, and this approach is useful for future data analysis in a big data environment where prediction can have more practical implications than significance testing. This study also examined the interplay between online reviews, sentiments and promotional strategies, which up to now have mostly been examined individually in previous studies.
This study aims to investigate the contributions of online promotional marketing and online revie... more This study aims to investigate the contributions of online promotional marketing and online reviews as predictors of consumer product demands. Using electronic data from Amazon.com, we attempt to predict if online review variables such as valence and volume of reviews, the number of positive and negative reviews, and online promotional marketing variables such as discounts and free deliveries, can influence the demand of electronic products in Amazon.com. A Big Data architecture was developed and Node.JS agents were deployed for scraping the Amazon.com pages using asynchronous Input/Output calls. The completed web crawling and scraping datasets were then preprocessed for Neural Network analysis. Our results showed that variables from both online reviews and promotional marketing strategies are important predictors of product demands. Variables in online reviews in general were better predictors as compared to online marketing promotional variables. This study provides important implications for practitioners as they can better understand how online reviews and online promotional marketing can influence product demands. Our empirical contributions include the design of a Big Data architecture that incorporate neural network analysis which can used as a platform for future researchers to investigate how Big Data can be used to understand and predict online consumer product demands.
3rd International Conference on Smart Sustainable City and Big Data 27-28 July 2015, Shanghai, China
Novelty detection in news events has long been a difficult problem. A number of models performed ... more Novelty detection in news events has long been a difficult problem. A number of models performed well on specific data streams but certain issues are far from being solved, particularly in large data streams from the WWW where unpredictability of new terms requires adaptation in the vector space model. We present a novel event detection system based on the Incremental Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting incorporated with Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). Our system could efficiently and effectively adapt to the changes within the data streams of any new terms with continual updates to the vector space model. Regarding miss probability, our proposed novelty detection framework outperforms a rec-ognised baseline system by approximately 16% when evaluating a benchmark dataset from Google News.
3rd International Conference on Smart Sustainable City and Big Data 27-28 July 2015, Shanghai, China
This research uses a Big Data methodology for under-standing geographic social-cultural indicator... more This research uses a Big Data methodology for under-standing geographic social-cultural indicators in Smart Cities that can be generalised to other topics, by investi-gating factors influencing sentiments of city dwellers via large-scale social media. We adopted an important indica-tor as a proof of concept reported here – alcohol consump-tion and factors influencing sentiments of world-wide cities. Big Data methodological approaches were used for collecting, pre-processing, analysing and mapping senti-ments over time. Geo-referencing was used for mapping 24-hour activities in relation to density and volume of activities, together with sentiment analysis, and multino-mial logistic regression. The results demonstrate the feasi-bility of our Big Data approach in Smart City sentiment monitoring. Based on a dataset of more than 369,000 tweets, our work shows that for emotionally charged tweets, the count of followers, location, alcohol strength and the sentiment of self-description are significant influ-encing variables. The research has definite implications in Smart City governance of public health, safety, and the public monitoring and mapping of hotspot areas at differ-ent time of day in real-time, and therefore the potential to predict the spread of behaviours that could impact on pub-lic safety. The generic methodology could be adopted for sentiments of variable topics in heterogeneous datasets.
Purpose – This article presents a Big Data solution as a methodological approach to the automated... more Purpose – This article presents a Big Data solution as a methodological approach to the automated collection, cleaning, collation and mapping of multimodal, longitudinal datasets from social media. The article constructs Social Information Landscapes. Design/methodology/approach – The research presented here adopts a Big Data methodological approach for mapping user-generated contents in social media. The methodology and algorithms presented are generic, and can be applied to diverse types of social media or user-generated contents involving user interactions, such as within blogs, comments in product pages and other forms of media, so long as a formal data structure proposed here can be constructed. Findings – The limited presentation of the sequential nature of content listings within social media and Web 2.0 pages, as viewed on Web browsers or on mobile devices, do not necessarily reveal nor make obvious an unknown nature of the medium; that every participant, from content producers, to consumers, to followers and subscribers, including the contents they produce or subscribed to, are intrinsically connected in a hidden but massive network. Such networks when mapped, could be quantitatively analysed using social network analysis (e.g., centralities), and the semantics and sentiments could equally reveal valuable information with appropriate analytics. Yet that which is difficult is the traditional approach of collecting, cleaning, collating and mapping such datasets into a sufficiently large sample of data that could yield important insights into the community structure and the directional, and polarity of interaction on diverse topics. This research solves this particular strand of problem. Research limitations/implications – The automated mapping of extremely large networks involving hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, encapsulating high resolution and contextual information, over a long period of time could possibly assist in the proving or even disproving of theories. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the feasibility of using automated approaches for acquiring massive, connected datasets for academic inquiry in the social sciences. Practical implications – The methods presented in this article, together with the Big Data architecture can assist individuals and institutions with a limited budget, with practical approaches in constructing social information landscapes. The software-hardware integrated architecture uses open source software, furthermore, the social information landscapes mapping algorithms are easy to implement. Originality/value – The majority of research in the literature uses traditional approaches for collecting social networks data. Traditional approaches can be slow and tedious; they do not yield adequate sample size to be of significant value for research. Whilst traditional approaches collect only a small percentage of data, the original methods presented here are able to collect and collate entire datasets in social media due to the automated and scalable mapping techniques.
proceedings of REHAB2015, Green Lines Institute, Volume 2, pp. 633-644
n China, many villages are facing severe decline and deprivation and some are even replaced or re... more n China, many villages are facing severe decline and deprivation and some are even replaced or reallocated over time. In recent years, the effects from rapid pace of urbanisation on rural areas has been so significant and at such large scale that rural communities are now facing new economic, social and environmental challenges. This interdisciplinary research aims to study a particular case of Chinese Ancient Village in the region of Zhejiang Province, East China. This study includes techniques for recording and preserving the particular case of a declining village in the Yinzhou District of Ningbo. Out of the many villages of the region, ZouMaTang is selected as the historical site as it is in major decline. This study discusses the application of various recording techniques and explores how such applications can support a holistic approach for recording and documenting spatial qualities, livelihoods and environmental configuration of this particular community. In this study, we present ways of capturing the realities and argue that our approach is essential to the understanding of heritage, its living patterns and the many architectural features and qualities of an ancient site. In this paper, the authors point out potentials and possibilities for the transition from the digital preservation to the local government's actual plan for the purpose of future regeneration and redevelopment of the village.
industrial management and data systems 115(4), Mar 2015
Purpose – The article explores the formation, maintenance and disintegration of a fringe Twitter... more Purpose – The article explores the formation, maintenance and disintegration of a fringe Twitter community in order to understand if offline community structure applies to online communities
Design/methodology/approach – The research adopted Big Data methodological approaches in tracking user-generated contents over a series of months and mapped online Twitter interactions as a multimodal, longitudinal ‘social information landscape’. Centrality measures were employed to gauge the importance of particular user nodes within the complete network and time-series analysis were used to track ego centralities in order to see if this particular online communities were maintained by specific egos.
Findings – The case study shows that communities with distinct boundaries and memberships can form and exist within Twitter’s limited user content and sequential policies, which unlike other social media services, do not support formal groups, demonstrating the resilience of desperate online users when their ideology overcome social media limitations. Analysis in this article using social networks approaches also reveals that communities are formed and maintained from the bottom-up.
Research limitations/implications – The research data is based on a particular dataset which occurred within a specific time and space. However, due to the rapid, polarising group behaviour, growth, disintegration and decline of the online community, the dataset presents a ‘laboratory’ case from which many other online community can be compared with. It is highly possible that the case can be generalised to a broader range of communities and from which online community theories can be proved/disproved.
Practical implications – The article showed that particular group of egos with high activities, if removed, could entirely break the cohesiveness of the community. Conversely, strengthening such egos will reinforce the community strength. The questions mooted within the paper and the methodology outlined can potentially be applied in a variety of social science research areas. The contribution to the understanding of a complex social and political arena, as outlined in the paper, is a key example of such an application within an increasingly strategic research area and this will surely be applied and developed further by the computer science and security community.
Originality/value – The majority of researches that cover these domains have not focused on communities that are multimodal and longitudinal. This is mainly due to the challenges associated with the collection and analysis of continuous datasets that have high volume and velocity. Such datasets are therefore unexploited with regards to cyber-community research.
On a multitouch table, user’s interactions with 3D virtual representations of real objects should... more On a multitouch table, user’s interactions with 3D virtual representations of real objects should be influenced by task and their perceived physical characteristics. This article explores the development and user study of an interactive 3D application that allows users to explore virtual heritage objects on a surface device. To-date, most multitouch has focused on 2D or 2.5D systems. A user-study is reported where we analyse their multimodal behaviour – specifically how they interact on a surface device with objects that have similar properties to physical versions and the users’ associated gaze patterns with touch. The study reveals that gaze characteristics are different according to their interaction intention in terms of position and duration of visual attention. We discovered that virtual objects afford the perception of haptic attributes ascribed to their equivalent physical objects, and that differences in the summary statistics of gaze showed consistent characteristics between people and differences between natural and task based activities. An awareness of user behaviours using natural gestures can inform the design of interactive 3D applications which complements the user’s model of past experience with physical objects and with GUI interaction.
The reconstruction of fragmented artefacts is a tedious process that consumes many valuable work ... more The reconstruction of fragmented artefacts is a tedious process that consumes many valuable work hours of scholars' time. We believe that such work can be made more efficient via new techniques in interactive virtual environments. The purpose of this research is to explore approaches to the reconstruction of cuneiform tablets in the real and virtual environment, and to address the potential barriers to virtual reconstruction of fragments. In this paper we present the results of an experiment exploring the reconstruction strategies employed by individual users working with tablet fragments in real and virtual environments. Our findings have identified physical factors that users find important to the reconstruction process and further explored the subjective usefulness of stereoscopic 3D in the reconstruction process. Our results, presented as dynamic graphs of interaction, compare the precise order of movement and rotation interactions, and the frequency of interaction achieved by successful and unsuccessful participants with some surprising insights. We present evidence that certain interaction styles and behaviours characterise success in the reconstruction process.
Social communication around art and cultural heritage objects occurs mostly on location in the mu... more Social communication around art and cultural heritage objects occurs mostly on location in the museums and between in-group acquaintances. Such discussions are often brief as competing array of displays and time constraints propel the social arrangement of groups of visitors forward to the next object. Discussions are more often than not fleeting and superficial, and rarely expand beyond the boundary of the group. We postulate that the interactivity afforded by augmented reality that allows the inspection of cultural heritage objects projected onto the real environment of users can be a better experience in terms of depth of viewing. We developed a mobile augmented reality application that allows multiuser interaction and propose that discussions that occur around cultural heritage objects can be replicated, and that such discussions can be expanded beyond in-groups. We conducted hypotheses testing across 10 groups of 30 participants to investigate if aspects of social communication can be facilitated or impeded by the perceived realism or artificiality of objects and explore which features of Social AR are more important for communication. The research aims to understand how social communication would work for AR when co-viewing heritage objects. The results have implications for necessitating cross-border and cross-cultural exchanges in an increasingly virtually connected world.
The universality of heritage carries the important connotation that it belongs to everyone. This ... more The universality of heritage carries the important connotation that it belongs to everyone. This universal value assigned to cultural heritage necessitates that it is international in nature, and that citizens of every country regardless of their background are given access and can learn from it. In this research, we investigate the web accessibility of the national-level museums of China that are ranked top three. We formulated a set of research questions and hypotheses that test assumptions, looking into the accessibility awareness in practice across 145 museums. We crawled a total of 113 web specific variables such as the number of objects in the collections, graded precious artefacts, and annual visitors. Other independent variables include summary accessibility errors such as contrast errors, alert errors, feature errors, structure, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and social media accounts. Details of the errors in each of these categories would form the majority of the remaining data points. The findings were surprisingly, not according to our original assumptions. Museums would stand to benefit from this study, which will in turn improve accessibility and inclusivity, and thus provide the international community with access to the rich collections of over 10 million cultural heritage objects scattered across the country.
Springer Series on Cultural Computing book series (SSCC), 2022
How we understand our shared and individual heritage, interpret and disseminate that knowledge is... more How we understand our shared and individual heritage, interpret and disseminate that knowledge is increasingly central to contemporary society. The emerging context for such development is the field of heritage science. Inherently interdisciplinary, and involving both the Arts and Humanities, engineering, conservation and the digital sciences, the development of heritage science is a driver for change; socially, economically and technically. This book has gathered contributions from leading researchers from across the world and provides a series of themed contributions demonstrating the theoretical, ethical, methodological and technical methods which lie at the heart of heritage science. Archaeology, conservation, museology, the arts, forensic sciences, and heritage management are represented through collaborative research with specialists in applied technologies including object and terrestrial laser scanning, multi-spectral imaging, visualisation, GIS and 3D-printing. Together, the chapters present important case studies to demonstrate the recent advances and best practise within the discipline, highlighting the value of digital transformation across the heritage community that includes objects, monuments, sites and landscapes spanning two million years of natural and cultural history from all over the world. Visual Heritage: Digital Approaches in Heritage Science aimed at a broad academic and practice-led readership, which extends across many disciplines and will be of considerable value to scholars, practitioners, and students working within heritage and computer science at all levels. The content, which applies heritage science across two million years of cultural history will be appreciated by a general audience, as well as those wishing simply to explore the vast range of potential technical applications across all the disciplines represented in the book.
Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, 2022
In recent years, many Asian cities have invested in the digitalization of cultural heritage, and ... more In recent years, many Asian cities have invested in the digitalization of cultural heritage, and participatory digital archiving platforms have also been developed. These innovations are widely lauded for their potential to rejuvenate heritage, reach out to youths in the public domain, and fostering participation and interaction through engaging activities. While the intention to leave a heritage as a legacy for the younger generation has always been the foundational objective of heritage policies, young publics are rarely envisaged as stakeholders in top-level planning of heritage strategies. The special issue call submissions that provide a better understanding of how digital tools can be used for mobilising activities core to cultural heritage and within the process, engage both institutions and grassroots communities such as young people as stakeholders. The special issue aims to both address and reflects upon the myriad opportunities and challenges that the use of new technologies have raised in the process of preserving cultural heritage in Asia so as to leave a legacy for our new generation. Especially focusing on the young generation as important heritage stakeholders and to investigate their role in the articulation between heritage and sustainable development. Questions for the special issue are included but not limited to: What are the necessary social, economic, and political conditions for leveraging the power of digital technology that can engage with the younger generations? What are the limits of audience interaction and participation in the digitalization of cultural heritage? How do young generations interact with cultural heritage within virtual and physical spaces? What can we do to empower and facilitate cooperation between governments, cultural and academic institutions in a way that engages with the young generations in digital heritage projects? What are the implications of such collaborations for heritage preservation and sustainable development? Submission • Closing date of submission window: 5th July 2022 • Scheduled publication date: May 2023 • Full papers should be submitted through the JCHMSD ScholarOne Manuscripts and will be subject to the peer review procedures. Please register and access: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jchmsd • Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jchmsd?_ga=2.208294416.383106498.164 4286268-775555333.1612172152#author-guidelines
Our article maps the well-being of the adoption and use of digital technologies in museums in Chi... more Our article maps the well-being of the adoption and use of digital technologies in museums in China. Digital technologies used here are termed ‘cultural technology’ in top-level national policies for the creative cultural industry, with culture and heritage at the core of all such activities. Our investigation aims to understand the present state of adoption and use of cultural technologies with the goal of identifying limitations so as to provide a roadmap for the informed design and development of museum-based digital exhibits that are appropriate for visitors. Whilst our study is focused on China's museums, our evaluation model and lessons learned can be used as comparative studies for museums globally. This highlights the novelty of our article, for the scale of which we carried out our evaluation has never been conducted before. We travelled 22 sites over 15 cities and collected over 800 samples of data. We evaluated 36 digital systems used by over 800 visitors and observed how users interacted and engaged with the systems with a record of 21 variables related to the length of interaction, engagement, quality of contents and types of systems, age groups, sexes, and the number of participants and whether they were individuals or in groups. Our investigation revealed important findings in both digital systems and visitor engagement.
Special Issue on Arts, Aesthetics, and Performance in VR and Telepresence, PRESENCE: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 26(2), MIT Press , 2017
This article presents a detailed design, development and implementation of a Mixed Reality Art-Sc... more This article presents a detailed design, development and implementation of a Mixed Reality Art-Science collaboration project which was exhibited during Darwin’s bicentenary exhibition at Shrewsbury, England. As an artist-led project the concerns of the artist were paramount, and this article presents Shift-Life as part of an on-going exploration into the parallels between the non-linear human thinking process and computation using semantic association to link items into ideas, and ideas into holistic concepts. Our art explores perceptions and states of mind as we move our attention between the simulated world of the computer and the real-world we inhabit, which means that any viewer engagement is participatory rather than passive. From a Mixed Reality point of view, the lead author intends to explore the convergence of the physical and virtual, therefore the formalisation of the Mixed Reality system, focusing on the integration of artificial life, ecology, physical sensors and participant interaction through an interface of physical props. It is common for digital media artists to allow viewers to activate a work either through a computer screen via direct keyboard or mouse manipulation, or through immersive means to activate their work, for “Shift-Life” the artist was concerned with a direct ‘relational’ approach where viewers would intuitively engage with the installation’s everyday objects, and with each other, to fully experience the piece. The Mixed Reality system is mediated via physical environmental sensors, which affect the virtual environment and autonomous agents, which in turn reacts and is expressed as virtual pixels projected onto a physical surface. The tangible hands-on interface proved to be instinctive, attractive and informative on many levels, delivering a good example of collaboration between the Arts and Science.
Archaeology is a broad church and its role as a “two culture” discipline is frequently cited. Th... more Archaeology is a broad church and its role as a “two culture” discipline is frequently cited. This position at the interface of the arts and sciences remains central to archaeological activity but there have been significant changes in the structure of archaeology and its relationship to society overall. The growth of heritage science, in particular, is increasingly driving change and development within archaeology at a national and international level. This paper discusses these developments in relation to the author’s own research trajectory and discusses the significance of such change.
Abstract—The first recorded crowdsourcing activity was in 1714 [1], with intermittent public even... more Abstract—The first recorded crowdsourcing activity was in 1714 [1], with intermittent public event occurrences up until the millennium when such activities become widespread, spanning multiple domains. Crowdsourcing, however, is relatively novel as a methodology within virtual environment studies, in archaeology, and within the heritage domains where this research is focused. The studies that are being conducted are few and far between in comparison to other areas. This paper aims to develop a recent concept in crowdsourcing work termed ‘crowd behaviour mining’ [2] using virtual environments, and to develop a unique concept in crowdsourcing activities that can be applied beyond the case studies presented here and to other domains that involve human behaviour as independent variables. The case studies described here use data from experiments involving separate heritage projects and conducted during two Royal Society Summer Science Exhibitions, in 2012 and 2015 respectively. ‘Crowd Behaviour Mining’ analysis demonstrated a capacity to inform research in respect of potential patterns and trends across space and time as well as preferences between demographic user groups and the influence of experimenters during the experiments.
Twitter Sentiment Analysis can be a useful vehicle to provide deep insight into how citizens feel... more Twitter Sentiment Analysis can be a useful vehicle to provide deep insight into how citizens feel, thus it enables Governments across the world to track the public’s political views. Various Sentiment Analysis techniques have been proposed in recent years, and automatic annotation of training sets using an emoticon heuristic has been proved useful. As emojis are becoming increasingly popular in online written communication, this research investigates the feasibility of an emoji training heuristic for Twitter Sentiment Analysis of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Multinomial Naïve Bayes classifier is used to build a sentiment classifier, which employs a variety of features. The results demonstrate the emoji heuristic together with our methodological framework achieve satisfying performance. We also apply our model to real-world presidential election tweets and present how the public views the top election candidates.
To manage supply chain efficiently, e-business organizations need to understand their sales effec... more To manage supply chain efficiently, e-business organizations need to understand their sales effectively. Previous research has shown that product review plays an important role in influencing sales performance, especially review volume and rating. However, limited attention has been paid to understand how other factors moderate the effect of product review on online sales. This study aims to confirm the importance of review volume and rating on improving sales performance, and further examine the moderating roles of product category, answered questions, discount and review usefulness in such relationships. By analyzing 2,939 records of data extracted from Amazon.com using a big data architecture, it is found that review volume and rating have stronger influence on sales rank for search product than for experience product. Also, review usefulness significantly moderates the effects of review volume and rating on product sales rank. In addition, the relationship between review volume and sales rank is significantly moderated by both answered questions and discount. However, answered questions and discount do not have significant moderation effect on the relationship between review rating and sales rank. The findings expand previous literature by confirming important interactions between customer review features and other factors, and the findings provide practical guidelines to manage e-businesses. This study also explains a big data architecture and illustrates the use of big data technologies in testing theoretical framework.
[Conclusion to Editor's Introduction] Optical scanning technology, remote sensing, sophisticated ... more [Conclusion to Editor's Introduction] Optical scanning technology, remote sensing, sophisticated 3D modeling tools and developments in efficient computer graphics rendering pipelines have fuelled worldwide virtual reconstructions of tangible heritage. Such needs prompted funding councils and agencies to reserve and distribute resources in order to support the development of technologies and methodologies that made high impact research possible. The visualization and real-time interactive aspects of such developments have since provided great opportunities for tangible heritage to be analyzed, interpreted and experienced via their virtual representations (Ch’ng, Gaffney & Chapman, 2013), with an observed shift towards new paradigms of investigation that informs academic research, such as complex systems science and agent-based modeling (Ch’ng, Gaffney & Chapman, 2013). However, in reviewing the present state of virtual heritage research, we realize that there remains a gap in the discipline. Most heritage applications lacked a sense of immersion in terms of ‘livingness’, life, behavior and cultural agents in the virtual environments, and there has not been any progression in such developments since a decade ago. Reconstructions of heritage as elaborate virtual manifestations of materiality are without life, if they are without representations of life and behavior as intangible heritage representations in the virtual environment. Perhaps it is time for the heritage community to lead, by defining genuine problems within their domains, working with the science and engineering disciplines so that the real value of heritage can be realized in the present day.
This study aims to investigate if online reviews (e.g. valence and volume), online promotional st... more This study aims to investigate if online reviews (e.g. valence and volume), online promotional strategies (e.g. free delivery and discounts) and sentiments from user reviews can help predict product sales. Design/methodology/approach: We designed a big data architecture and deployed Node.JS agents for scraping the Amazon.com pages using asynchronous Input/Output calls. The completed web crawling and scraping datasets were then preprocessed for sentimental and neural network analysis. The neural network was employed to examine which variables in our study are important predictors of product sales. Findings: This study found that although online reviews, online promotional strategies and online sentiments can all predict product sales, some variables are more important predictors than others. We found that the interplay effects of these variables become more important variables than the individual variables themselves. For example, online volume interactions with sentiments and discounts are more important than the individual predictors of discounts, sentiments or online volume. Originality/value: This study designed big data architecture, in combination with sentimental and neural network analysis that can facilitate future business research for predicting product sales in an online environment. This study also employed a predictive analytic approach (e.g. neural network) to examine the variables, and this approach is useful for future data analysis in a big data environment where prediction can have more practical implications than significance testing. This study also examined the interplay between online reviews, sentiments and promotional strategies, which up to now have mostly been examined individually in previous studies.
This study aims to investigate the contributions of online promotional marketing and online revie... more This study aims to investigate the contributions of online promotional marketing and online reviews as predictors of consumer product demands. Using electronic data from Amazon.com, we attempt to predict if online review variables such as valence and volume of reviews, the number of positive and negative reviews, and online promotional marketing variables such as discounts and free deliveries, can influence the demand of electronic products in Amazon.com. A Big Data architecture was developed and Node.JS agents were deployed for scraping the Amazon.com pages using asynchronous Input/Output calls. The completed web crawling and scraping datasets were then preprocessed for Neural Network analysis. Our results showed that variables from both online reviews and promotional marketing strategies are important predictors of product demands. Variables in online reviews in general were better predictors as compared to online marketing promotional variables. This study provides important implications for practitioners as they can better understand how online reviews and online promotional marketing can influence product demands. Our empirical contributions include the design of a Big Data architecture that incorporate neural network analysis which can used as a platform for future researchers to investigate how Big Data can be used to understand and predict online consumer product demands.
3rd International Conference on Smart Sustainable City and Big Data 27-28 July 2015, Shanghai, China
Novelty detection in news events has long been a difficult problem. A number of models performed ... more Novelty detection in news events has long been a difficult problem. A number of models performed well on specific data streams but certain issues are far from being solved, particularly in large data streams from the WWW where unpredictability of new terms requires adaptation in the vector space model. We present a novel event detection system based on the Incremental Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting incorporated with Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). Our system could efficiently and effectively adapt to the changes within the data streams of any new terms with continual updates to the vector space model. Regarding miss probability, our proposed novelty detection framework outperforms a rec-ognised baseline system by approximately 16% when evaluating a benchmark dataset from Google News.
3rd International Conference on Smart Sustainable City and Big Data 27-28 July 2015, Shanghai, China
This research uses a Big Data methodology for under-standing geographic social-cultural indicator... more This research uses a Big Data methodology for under-standing geographic social-cultural indicators in Smart Cities that can be generalised to other topics, by investi-gating factors influencing sentiments of city dwellers via large-scale social media. We adopted an important indica-tor as a proof of concept reported here – alcohol consump-tion and factors influencing sentiments of world-wide cities. Big Data methodological approaches were used for collecting, pre-processing, analysing and mapping senti-ments over time. Geo-referencing was used for mapping 24-hour activities in relation to density and volume of activities, together with sentiment analysis, and multino-mial logistic regression. The results demonstrate the feasi-bility of our Big Data approach in Smart City sentiment monitoring. Based on a dataset of more than 369,000 tweets, our work shows that for emotionally charged tweets, the count of followers, location, alcohol strength and the sentiment of self-description are significant influ-encing variables. The research has definite implications in Smart City governance of public health, safety, and the public monitoring and mapping of hotspot areas at differ-ent time of day in real-time, and therefore the potential to predict the spread of behaviours that could impact on pub-lic safety. The generic methodology could be adopted for sentiments of variable topics in heterogeneous datasets.
Purpose – This article presents a Big Data solution as a methodological approach to the automated... more Purpose – This article presents a Big Data solution as a methodological approach to the automated collection, cleaning, collation and mapping of multimodal, longitudinal datasets from social media. The article constructs Social Information Landscapes. Design/methodology/approach – The research presented here adopts a Big Data methodological approach for mapping user-generated contents in social media. The methodology and algorithms presented are generic, and can be applied to diverse types of social media or user-generated contents involving user interactions, such as within blogs, comments in product pages and other forms of media, so long as a formal data structure proposed here can be constructed. Findings – The limited presentation of the sequential nature of content listings within social media and Web 2.0 pages, as viewed on Web browsers or on mobile devices, do not necessarily reveal nor make obvious an unknown nature of the medium; that every participant, from content producers, to consumers, to followers and subscribers, including the contents they produce or subscribed to, are intrinsically connected in a hidden but massive network. Such networks when mapped, could be quantitatively analysed using social network analysis (e.g., centralities), and the semantics and sentiments could equally reveal valuable information with appropriate analytics. Yet that which is difficult is the traditional approach of collecting, cleaning, collating and mapping such datasets into a sufficiently large sample of data that could yield important insights into the community structure and the directional, and polarity of interaction on diverse topics. This research solves this particular strand of problem. Research limitations/implications – The automated mapping of extremely large networks involving hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, encapsulating high resolution and contextual information, over a long period of time could possibly assist in the proving or even disproving of theories. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the feasibility of using automated approaches for acquiring massive, connected datasets for academic inquiry in the social sciences. Practical implications – The methods presented in this article, together with the Big Data architecture can assist individuals and institutions with a limited budget, with practical approaches in constructing social information landscapes. The software-hardware integrated architecture uses open source software, furthermore, the social information landscapes mapping algorithms are easy to implement. Originality/value – The majority of research in the literature uses traditional approaches for collecting social networks data. Traditional approaches can be slow and tedious; they do not yield adequate sample size to be of significant value for research. Whilst traditional approaches collect only a small percentage of data, the original methods presented here are able to collect and collate entire datasets in social media due to the automated and scalable mapping techniques.
proceedings of REHAB2015, Green Lines Institute, Volume 2, pp. 633-644
n China, many villages are facing severe decline and deprivation and some are even replaced or re... more n China, many villages are facing severe decline and deprivation and some are even replaced or reallocated over time. In recent years, the effects from rapid pace of urbanisation on rural areas has been so significant and at such large scale that rural communities are now facing new economic, social and environmental challenges. This interdisciplinary research aims to study a particular case of Chinese Ancient Village in the region of Zhejiang Province, East China. This study includes techniques for recording and preserving the particular case of a declining village in the Yinzhou District of Ningbo. Out of the many villages of the region, ZouMaTang is selected as the historical site as it is in major decline. This study discusses the application of various recording techniques and explores how such applications can support a holistic approach for recording and documenting spatial qualities, livelihoods and environmental configuration of this particular community. In this study, we present ways of capturing the realities and argue that our approach is essential to the understanding of heritage, its living patterns and the many architectural features and qualities of an ancient site. In this paper, the authors point out potentials and possibilities for the transition from the digital preservation to the local government's actual plan for the purpose of future regeneration and redevelopment of the village.
industrial management and data systems 115(4), Mar 2015
Purpose – The article explores the formation, maintenance and disintegration of a fringe Twitter... more Purpose – The article explores the formation, maintenance and disintegration of a fringe Twitter community in order to understand if offline community structure applies to online communities
Design/methodology/approach – The research adopted Big Data methodological approaches in tracking user-generated contents over a series of months and mapped online Twitter interactions as a multimodal, longitudinal ‘social information landscape’. Centrality measures were employed to gauge the importance of particular user nodes within the complete network and time-series analysis were used to track ego centralities in order to see if this particular online communities were maintained by specific egos.
Findings – The case study shows that communities with distinct boundaries and memberships can form and exist within Twitter’s limited user content and sequential policies, which unlike other social media services, do not support formal groups, demonstrating the resilience of desperate online users when their ideology overcome social media limitations. Analysis in this article using social networks approaches also reveals that communities are formed and maintained from the bottom-up.
Research limitations/implications – The research data is based on a particular dataset which occurred within a specific time and space. However, due to the rapid, polarising group behaviour, growth, disintegration and decline of the online community, the dataset presents a ‘laboratory’ case from which many other online community can be compared with. It is highly possible that the case can be generalised to a broader range of communities and from which online community theories can be proved/disproved.
Practical implications – The article showed that particular group of egos with high activities, if removed, could entirely break the cohesiveness of the community. Conversely, strengthening such egos will reinforce the community strength. The questions mooted within the paper and the methodology outlined can potentially be applied in a variety of social science research areas. The contribution to the understanding of a complex social and political arena, as outlined in the paper, is a key example of such an application within an increasingly strategic research area and this will surely be applied and developed further by the computer science and security community.
Originality/value – The majority of researches that cover these domains have not focused on communities that are multimodal and longitudinal. This is mainly due to the challenges associated with the collection and analysis of continuous datasets that have high volume and velocity. Such datasets are therefore unexploited with regards to cyber-community research.
On a multitouch table, user’s interactions with 3D virtual representations of real objects should... more On a multitouch table, user’s interactions with 3D virtual representations of real objects should be influenced by task and their perceived physical characteristics. This article explores the development and user study of an interactive 3D application that allows users to explore virtual heritage objects on a surface device. To-date, most multitouch has focused on 2D or 2.5D systems. A user-study is reported where we analyse their multimodal behaviour – specifically how they interact on a surface device with objects that have similar properties to physical versions and the users’ associated gaze patterns with touch. The study reveals that gaze characteristics are different according to their interaction intention in terms of position and duration of visual attention. We discovered that virtual objects afford the perception of haptic attributes ascribed to their equivalent physical objects, and that differences in the summary statistics of gaze showed consistent characteristics between people and differences between natural and task based activities. An awareness of user behaviours using natural gestures can inform the design of interactive 3D applications which complements the user’s model of past experience with physical objects and with GUI interaction.
The reconstruction of fragmented artefacts is a tedious process that consumes many valuable work ... more The reconstruction of fragmented artefacts is a tedious process that consumes many valuable work hours of scholars' time. We believe that such work can be made more efficient via new techniques in interactive virtual environments. The purpose of this research is to explore approaches to the reconstruction of cuneiform tablets in the real and virtual environment, and to address the potential barriers to virtual reconstruction of fragments. In this paper we present the results of an experiment exploring the reconstruction strategies employed by individual users working with tablet fragments in real and virtual environments. Our findings have identified physical factors that users find important to the reconstruction process and further explored the subjective usefulness of stereoscopic 3D in the reconstruction process. Our results, presented as dynamic graphs of interaction, compare the precise order of movement and rotation interactions, and the frequency of interaction achieved by successful and unsuccessful participants with some surprising insights. We present evidence that certain interaction styles and behaviours characterise success in the reconstruction process.
Visual Heritage: Digital approaches to heritage science, 2022
Heritage Science is an emerging domain which is inherently interdisciplinary, reaching from the a... more Heritage Science is an emerging domain which is inherently interdisciplinary, reaching from the arts and humanities to encompass practice from the sciences and engineering. Increasingly trends in digital technologies have influenced, and indeed transformed many aspects of the process and activities that are core to cultural heritage. The visual quality of this contribution is manifest both in the imaging methods used for capture and in the value of the visual outputs – ranging from digitised 3D models of cultural heritage to transformative visualisations that communicate meanings via embedded memories and narratives. the wealth of knowledge contained within this book illustrates how digital approaches in Heritage Science continue to drive forward innovations at scale that contribute highly visual and arresting contents, delivering new findings that transform our understanding of the past and ultimately make it more accessible to varied audiences. This book is aimed at a very broad academic and practice-led readership, which extends across many disciplines and will be of considerable value to students at all levels working across heritage and computer science. The content will be appreciated by a generalist audience as well as those wishing to explore the vast range of potential, technical applications. The case studies presented here are international and have a global reach across a range of diverse topics. Examining digital technologies with a goal to preserve cultural and natural heritage at a global level and in the face of previously unimaginable threats from climate change, through fake news to catastrophic insurrection
Governments across the world are trying to move closer to their citizens for better smart city mo... more Governments across the world are trying to move closer to their citizens for better smart city monitoring and governance. Twitter Sentiment Analysis is opening new opportunities to achieve it. In this paper, a methodological framework to collect, pre-process, analyse and map citizen sentiment from Twitter in helping the Governments monitor their citizens' moods is proposed based on the prior works. Multinomial Naïve Bayes classifier is used to build a sentiment classifier, which employs a variety of features including a specific microblogging feature – emoji. Our proposed sentiment model outperforms the top system in the task of Sentiment Analysis in Twitter in SemEval-2013 in terms of averaged F scores. The novel feature emoji has proved to be useful for Sentiment Analysis in Twitter data in this work. We also apply our model to real-world tweets and present how Government agencies can track the fluctuation of citizens' moods using mapping techniques.
Digitising artist books could potentially open up their contents to audiences around the world. R... more Digitising artist books could potentially open up their contents to audiences around the world. Reflecting on workshops held in 2012, Richard Clay and Eugune Ch’ng ask if they can ever be a substitute for the physical object.
Heritage is everywhere, and an understanding of our past is increasingly critical to the understa... more Heritage is everywhere, and an understanding of our past is increasingly critical to the understanding of our contemporary cultural context and place in global society. Visual Heritage in the Digital Age presents the state-of-the-art in the application of digital technologies to heritage studies, with the chapters collectively demonstrating the ways in which current developments are liberating the study, conservation and management of the past. Digital approaches to heritage have developed significantly over recent decades in terms of both the quantity and range of applications. However, rather than merely improving and enriching the ways in which we understand and engage with the past, this technology is enabling us to do this in entirely new ways.
The chapters contained within this volume present a broad range of technologies for capturing data (such as high-definition laser scanning survey and geophysical survey), modelling (including GIS, data fusion, agent-based modelling), and engaging with heritage through novel digital interfaces (mobile technologies and the use of multi-touch interfaces in public spaces). The case studies presented include sites, landscapes and buildings from across Europe, North and Central America, and collections relating to the ancient civilisations of the Middle East and North Africa. The chronological span is immense, extending from the end of the last ice age through to the twentieth century.
These case studies reveal new ways of approaching heritage using digital tools, whether from the perspective of interrogating historical textual data, or through the applications of complexity theory and the modelling of agents and behaviours. Beyond the data itself, Visual Heritage in the Digital Age also presents fresh ways of thinking about digital heritage. It explores more theoretical perspectives concerning the role of digital data and the challenges that are presented in terms of its management and preservation.
The paper presents the trajectory of a collaborative art practice towards intuitive interaction a... more The paper presents the trajectory of a collaborative art practice towards intuitive interaction and shared holistic understanding. From initial explorations into the efficacy of associative media for constructing conceptual-based artworks, in that hypermedia had of the intent of augmenting human intellect, behaviours were applied to hypermedia data items. The rationale for this is explained through developments in the ongoing ‘Deconstructing Duchamp’ project, where ‘flocking’ behaviours have been applied to Duchampian digitised items to observe the familial relations within, and key to his work, at play. Following this project, a second work ‘Shift-Life’ has proceeded to further develop the idea of allotting animal-like behaviours to electronic data items giving them the appearance of possessing a basic intelligence. By then observing their response to our physical interactions we can glean a clearer understanding, from their inter-relationships, of a complex conceptual framework. While Marcel Duchamp offered the art world one of the most complex and formative pieces of art ever, initiating the shift of values from aesthetics to idea, Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution, the ‘big’ idea of survivability through adaptation. Shift-Life was created as part of the national Darwin 200 project for the international bicentenary in 2009. It is a complex system of virtual life-forms struggling to survive in an environment made volatile through human interaction. Central to this installation work is the artificial life ecosystem as a self-sustaining, self-reproducing equilibrium of creatures and plants living in it. The general behaviour of each organism was more sophisticated than for the Duchampian creatures in that they were equipped for survival strategies and the reproduction of progenies. An exposition of the Shift-Life program is therefore presented followed by reflection on both projects and future directions for this collaborative research where potential emergent behaviours are concerned.
The information society manufactures, manipulates, and commodifies information. Heritage is one s... more The information society manufactures, manipulates, and commodifies information. Heritage is one such area that is undergoing digital transformation. Heritage is increasingly being transmuted through digitisation devices such as laser and structured light scans into multiple representations of information. The rich information of a heritage object or an environment can be restructured, transmitted, and recomposed into a mediated form both textual and non-textual. Once digitised, it becomes free from its physical predecessor; it enters another world that defies the physical laws of nature where the imagination of the maker is a limit. Such worlds accompanied by their objects are accessible in new yet intuitive ways via surface computers. The horizontal nature of the multitouch-multiuser surface computer then becomes the mirror that links both worlds, allowing access into a virtual space via the touch-table computing paradigm. This article explores 3D surface computing, its technology, capabilities and limits with developments of two multitouch applications incorporating heritage objects and environments, and the observation of the reactions of initial users. It addresses new issues and challenges surrounding the use of surface computing and how the access and transmission of heritage information via multitouch-multiuser tables are able to contribute to the accessibility, teaching and learning of heritage.
Recent decades have seen an exponential rise in the application of computer visualisation to heri... more Recent decades have seen an exponential rise in the application of computer visualisation to heritage sites and landscapes. In some ways this may be seen as an improved approach to illustration. As such, digital visualisation of reconstructed sites is commonly seen as something which occurs at the end of a heritage research project and aimed at disseminating results to a wider audience. Recently, however, there has been a growing realisation that the actual process of digital visualisation involving computational methods can offer much more than traditional illustrative approaches. For example, in addition to facilitating new ways of engaging with virtual environments, the process of visualisation offers new ways of interrogating archived data and raises new hypotheses that drive further research. Furthermore, the inclusion of games environments, agent-based modelling, and the new generation of data capture devices now means that the process of visualisation has become an integral part of the research process itself. This article focuses on processual guidelines on visualisation as first a process and then a product for capturing, reconstructing and visualising heritage sites for the phenomenological interpretation of sites.
in Visual Heritage in the Digital Age, Ch'ng E., Gaffney V.L., Chapman, H.C. (eds.), 2013
Agent-based modelling and simulation of survival and settlement behaviour via interactive visual... more Agent-based modelling and simulation of survival and settlement behaviour via interactive visualisation could potentially become a useful technique for generating new knowledge in those areas that sparse information, acquired through traditional methods, does not allow researchers to make informed decisions about past behaviour. This is particularly important following the development of remote sensing technologies that, in marine environments, are permitting novel exploration of previously inaccessible historic landscapes. This article explores and develops an agent-based model for basic survival and settlement behaviour for Mesolithic communities based within a marine palaeolandscape. It discusses the issues regarding how agents can be created to react to resource and environmental needs and limitations. The methodological study examines individual agent behaviour and sets the foundation for future, more complex scenarios that span large spatio-temporal landscapes including the North Sea and European coastal shelves. The article also considers the key technical challenges that must be met if large complex scenarios emerge in which the modelling of interaction between vegetation, animals and human groups becomes a priority.
in Visual Heritage in the Digital Age, Ch'ng E., Gaffney V.L., Chapman, H.C. (eds.), 2013
Cuneiform script, an intellectual breakthrough 5,000 years ago, made recording information possi... more Cuneiform script, an intellectual breakthrough 5,000 years ago, made recording information possible. Cuneiform is mankind’s first ever script, recorded and communicated using clay tablets for thousands of years across the entirety of the Ancient Near East. Remnants of the medium are now stored worldwide in many of collections and time required for the joining of the fragments using traditional methodologies means that the information recorded within these fragments will not be known in our lifetime. The research narrated in this chapter opens up a novel method for reconstructing the fragments, using nature-inspired approaches and new mobile digitising technology. It covers groundwork done to date for supporting a fullscale stigmergy reconstruction of cuneiform tablets and provides hypothetical scenarios within a theoretical framework for testing ‘in the wild’.
in Visual Heritage in the Digital Age, Ch'ng E., Gaffney V.L., Chapman, H.C. (eds.), 2013
Digital approaches to heritage and archaeology were in development since the 1980s and witnessed... more Digital approaches to heritage and archaeology were in development since the 1980s and witnessed exponential growth throughout the 1990s. The successive decade saw the breadth and depth of digital technology being applied in heritage and archaeology, encompassing a more complete process in research and focusing on more practical methodologies. It is perhaps at this juncture that digital heritage can be said to be approaching a stage of maturity. The impacts of technological change on the process and dissemination of research witnessed within this volume have demonstrated just that. However, the combinations and permutations of existing and emerging digital technologies and the subject of study in heritage and archaeology are continually creating new areas of research. In this concluding chapter, we reflect upon the research presented in this volume and explore the notion of a continuum of digital heritage development and the recent changes in a more substantive manner.
in Visual Heritage in the Digital Age, Ch'ng E., Gaffney V.L., Chapman, H.C. (eds.), 2013
Digital technology and visualisation play an increasingly large role within the strategic framewo... more Digital technology and visualisation play an increasingly large role within the strategic framework of the Arts and Humanities. This is not in itself unexpected given the nature of research in these disciplines but the need to obtain and process large amounts of data, to gather this from disparate locations and then to link and disseminate this information in a manner that challenges researchers and informs the wider public which is both a challenge and an opportunity. Digital technology in Heritage is at the forefront of such a development through its relationship with large scale or pervasive visualisation and emerging human–computer interfaces with efficient algorithms for the processing, analysis and access of linked large-scale datasets. The ‘‘Big Data’’ worlds created by Arts and Humanities and Heritage research are proxies through which we may access the past and also make sense of the world in which we live. In this context therefore, the state-of-the-art applications presented in this volume provide a snapshot of our current position in this exciting new research landscape. The collection of chapters presents digital technology as part of an iterative process of investigation within Arts and Humanities, encompassing data capture, processing, analysis, interpretation and dissemination via interactive visualisation. The content of this book is inspired by the themes—objects, monuments, landscapes and behaviours and each chapter presents original research associated with the exploration and application of digital visual technologies within these research domains within. As a whole, the chapters demonstrate the diversity and scale of research in the discipline, and the utilisation of a wide range of digital technology to facilitate research on the frontiers of digital heritage.
This research investigates the factors and ways in which users initiated conversations and engage... more This research investigates the factors and ways in which users initiated conversations and engage in interactions in a hybrid virtual environment using a combination of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) devices. The research was done in the 'spirit of the Ancient Silk Road' where trade brought in exchange of ideas, cultural influence and cross-border communications. The notion of a 21 st century Silk Road is necessarily digital, over the Internet and based around 3D cultural heritage objects. Digi-Capital's Report forecasts the revenue of AR and VR to be US$150b by 2020. We projected that VR and AR will become pervasive, much like the Social Web and the universal ubiquity of mobile devices (smartphones and wearables). Here, we conducted a user study exploring users' acceptance of the use of hybrid VR and AR for cultural heritage, and investigated the social nature of multiple co-located user interaction. We adapted the UTAUT questionnaire in our experiment and found that social influence has positive effects on performance expectancy and effort expectancy, which generate positive effects on user behavioural intention. This study pioneers the future design and use of hybrid VR and AR technology in cultural heritage specifically, and in other application areas generally by highlighting the significant role that social influence plays in enhancing users' behavioural intention facilitated by different immersive devices.
IEEE Special Issue on Computational Archaeology. Computer Volume, 2011
Résumé/Abstract Remote sensing, powerful computing engines, and agent-based models offer new ways... more Résumé/Abstract Remote sensing, powerful computing engines, and agent-based models offer new ways to interpret data and broaden data collection, moving archaeologists closer to their ultimate goal of approximating the individual within an extensive, interpreted, ...
As this volume, the final monograph of the SPLASHCOS network, was being finalised, the European R... more As this volume, the final monograph of the SPLASHCOS network, was being finalised, the European Research Council agreed to fund a major new project relating to the marine palaeolandscapes of the southern North Sea. Emerging from the earlier work of the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project (NSPP), the Lost Frontiers project seeks to go beyond the maps generated by that ground-breaking research. Led by researchers in the fields of archaeogeophysics, molecular biology and computer simulation, the project seeks to develop a new paradigm for the study of past environments, ecological change and the transition between hunter gathering societies and farming in North West Europe. Following from earlier work, the project will seek to release the full potential of the available seismic reflectance data sets to generate topographical maps of the whole of early Holocene Doggerland that are as accurate and complete as possible. Using these data, the study will then reconstruct and simulate the emerging palaeoenvironments of Doggerland using conventional palaeoenvironmental data, as well as ancient DNA extracted directly from sediment cores along the routes of two submerged river valleys. Using this base data, the project aims to transform our understanding of the colonisation of the North Sea
Reprinted with permission from Looking to the Future, Caring for the Past. Copyright 2016, Bonon... more Reprinted with permission from Looking to the Future, Caring for the Past. Copyright 2016, Bononia University Press. Editor Federica Boschi
Novelty detection in news events has long been a difficult problem. A number of models performed ... more Novelty detection in news events has long been a difficult problem. A number of models performed well on specific data streams but certain issues are far from being solved, particularly in large data streams from the WWW where unpredictability of new terms requires adaptation in the vector space model. We present a novel event detection system based on the Incremental Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting incorporated with Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). Our system could efficiently and effectively adapt to the changes within the data streams of any new terms with continual updates to the vector space model. Regarding miss probability, our proposed novelty detection framework outperforms a rec-ognised baseline system by approximately 16% when evaluating a benchmark dataset from Google News.
The small-world phenomenon is found in many self-organising systems. Systems configured in small-... more The small-world phenomenon is found in many self-organising systems. Systems configured in small-world networks spread information more easily than in random or regular lattice-type networks. Whilst it is a known fact that small-world networks have short average path length and high clustering coefficient in self-organising systems, the ego centralities that maintain the cohesiveness of small-world network have not been formally defined. Here we show that instantaneous events such as the release of news items via Twitter, coupled with active community arguments related to the news item form a particular type of small-world network. Analysis of the centralities in the network reveals that community arguments maintain the small-world network whilst actively maintaining the cohesiveness and boundary of the group. The results demonstrate how an active Twitter community unconsciously forms a small-world network whilst interacting locally with a bordering community. Over time, such local interactions brought about the global emergence of the small-world network, connecting media channels with human activities. Understanding the small-world phenomenon in relation to online social or civic movement is important, as evident in the spate of online activists that tipped the power of governments for the better or worst in recent times. The support, or removal of high centrality nodes in such networks has important ramifications in the self-expression of society and civic discourses. The presentation in this article anticipates further exploration of man-made self-organising systems where a larger cluster of ad-hoc and active community maintains the overall cohesiveness of the network.
VISUAL HERITAGE: DIGITAL REPRODUCTION AND CONTEXTUALISATION IN HERITAGE SCIENCE - CALL FOR PAPERS
Following the success of “Visual Heritage in the Digital Age” in Springer’s Cultural Computing Se... more Following the success of “Visual Heritage in the Digital Age” in Springer’s Cultural Computing Series, Springernow planning a second volume exploring emerging themes in digital heritage.
Under the broad title of Heritage Science, this aims to look at the role of digital technologies in preserving cultural and natural heritage at a global level the face of previously unimaginable threats: from climate change, through fake news to catastrophic insurrection. The relevant disciplines listed below will form the themes of the volume:
• Heritage Science and Technology – definition and trends • Modelling Past Environments – understanding the past • Digital and Virtual Heritage Research and Applications – machine-facilitated heritage and human-machine-interfaces • Crowd-sourcing and Democratisation of Digital Heritage • Cultural and Creative Industries – societal and economic value
Interested? Want to submit a paper? Have a look at the attached PDF or contact the editor of your choice!
Professor Eugene Ch’ng FHEA NVIDIA Joint-Lab on Mixed Reality, NVIDIA Technology Centre University of Nottingham Ningbo China Email: eugene.chng@nottingham.edu.cn
Professor Henry Chapman FSA Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Email: h.chapman@bham.ac.uk
Professor Vincent Gaffney MBE FSA School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences Bradford, UK Email: v.gaffney@bradford.ac.uk
Professor Andrew S. Wilson MCIfA, FHEA School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences Bradford, UK Email: A.S.Wilson2@bradford.ac.uk
Life and death in prehistory - ice melts sea levels rise and hunters and fishers adapt or die as ... more Life and death in prehistory - ice melts sea levels rise and hunters and fishers adapt or die as part of an agent-based model. All in an interactive sandpit. More at https://lostfrontiers.teamapp.com/articles
The final tranche of marine cores from the first Lost Frontiers North Sea coring programme was sp... more The final tranche of marine cores from the first Lost Frontiers North Sea coring programme was split at Warwick last week under the watchful eyes of Drs Ware and Bates (https://lostfrontiers.teamapp.com/ and https://goo.gl/n7pNJh). A total sections of 39 sections of cores were split and 46 samples taken for aDNA analysis. This completes all of the cores retrieved by Gardline’s MV Ivero during Lost Frontiers first coring campaign(https://goo.gl/yR4Q2I).
As with the first set of cores the new samples again yielded exceptionally well preserved material which featured numerous peat deposits, laminated organic clays and a full sequence documenting the marine inundation of Doggerland.
All the remaining parts of the 2 sets of cores have now been moved to the new cold stores at the University of Wales in preparation for further sampling by Dr Martin Bates and analysis at the University of Birmingham by Dr David Smith. A full programme of study including palynology and palaeoentomology will now take place along with a separate programme of radiocarbon (C14) dating. More to follow very soon!
Data visualization is an important aspect of data analytics in an age where decisions are all bas... more Data visualization is an important aspect of data analytics in an age where decisions are all based on information. Approaches in data visualization, particularly those that have the capability of processing large-scale textual datasets and visualize them as structured information in real-time can be useful for monitoring trends in social media. In this article, we present our GPU accelerated project, which uses CUDA to distribute and parallelize the processing and analysis of textual data in order to visualize information in real-time, or close to real-time as a foundational system for the future of real-time applications which monitors trends in social media, applicable to political elections, social media analytics, and other needs in computational social sciences which are time-critical.
The 23rd Int’l Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia will be held October 30th - November ... more The 23rd Int’l Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia will be held October 30th - November 2nd 2017 in Ireland at University College Dublin, with Special Workshops and Cultural Tours on November 3rd - 5th in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
VSMM2017 will explore ground-breaking applications of new media, VR, sensing, and imaging in creative societies. Some 30 years after the dawn of VR, with a new boom in virtual devices, products and applications, it is an apt moment to look “Back to the Future” and examine the potentials and pitfalls of VR, AR and 3D technologies. With virtual and 3D technology entering health to tourism, games to manufacturing, and art to entertainment, deep issues and questions arise.
The Conference will bring together researchers and academics, creative industry professionals and technologists, futurists and students to explore where virtual and 3D technologies have been and are taking us. Experts in the arts and culture, heritage and museums, design and engineering, architecture and planning, health and inclusion, and computing and digital systems are invited to gather to present, discuss, debate and learn.
Marine palaeolandscapes and the historic impact of long-term climate change:
Royal Society
Chic... more Marine palaeolandscapes and the historic impact of long-term climate change: Royal Society Chicheley Hall May 15-16 2017
The Royal Society are hosting a Theo Murphy international scientific meeting on the implications of current research on marine palaeolandscapes. “Lost and Future Worlds: Marine palaeolandscapes and the historic impact of long-term climate change” has been organised by Professor Vincent Gaffney, Professor Geoff Bailey, Dr Richard Bates, Dr Philip Murgatroyd, Dr Eugene Ch’ng and Professor Robin G. Allaby the meeting will be held the Royal Society at conference centre at Chicheley Hall, Buckinghamshire (https://goo.gl/jgO5Ri), between Monday 15 May – Tuesday 16 May.
Global warming following the last glacial maximum led to the global submergence of vast, populated landscapes. These largely unexplored lands hold a unique record of habitation linked to climate change. Frequently inaccessible, and unamenable to conventional analysis, this meeting brings together experts across historical and scientific disciplines to identify new analytical methods and the contemporary relevance of these lost lands.
Advanced registration is essential (please request an invitation from https://goo.gl/nDjGbR
Catering and accommodation are available to purchase during registration
Poster session There will be a poster session at 17:00 on Monday 15 May 2017. If you would like to apply to present a poster please submit your proposed title, abstract (not more than 200 words and in third person), author list, name of the proposed presenter and institution to the Scientific Programmes team no later than Monday 3 April 2017.
Please note that places are limited and are selected at the scientific organisers discretion. Poster abstracts will only be considered if the presenter is registered to attend the meeting.
Europe's Lost Frontiers: Research 2016-2017, Jan 18, 2018
Europe's Lost Frontiers
Summary report on research 2016-2017
Europe's Lost Frontiers is a 5 yea... more Europe's Lost Frontiers Summary report on research 2016-2017
Europe's Lost Frontiers is a 5 year research project (2015 - 2020), funded by the European Research Council, and brings together experts from the fields of archaeology, geophysics, molecular biology and computer simulation to explore these lost landscapes. The project aims to study how the communities of the great plains reacted to climate change and the encroaching sea, as well as seeking clues to how these communities responded to the introduction of farming and the decline of hunter-gatherer societies
Uploads
Visual Heritage: Digital Approaches in Heritage Science aimed at a broad academic and practice-led readership, which extends across many disciplines and will be of considerable value to scholars, practitioners, and students working within heritage and computer science at all levels. The content, which applies heritage science across two million years of cultural history will be appreciated by a general audience, as well as those wishing simply to explore the vast range of potential technical applications across all the disciplines represented in the book.
The special issue call submissions that provide a better understanding of how digital tools can be used for mobilising activities core to cultural heritage and within the process, engage both institutions and grassroots communities such as young people as stakeholders. The special issue aims to both address and reflects upon the myriad opportunities and challenges that the use of new technologies have raised in the process of preserving cultural heritage in Asia so as to leave a legacy for our new generation. Especially focusing on the young generation as important heritage stakeholders and to investigate their role in the articulation between heritage and sustainable development.
Questions for the special issue are included but not limited to:
What are the necessary social, economic, and political conditions for leveraging the power of digital technology that can engage with the younger generations? What are the limits of audience interaction and participation in the digitalization of cultural heritage? How do young generations interact with cultural heritage within virtual and physical spaces? What can we do to empower and facilitate cooperation between governments, cultural and academic institutions in a way that engages with the young generations in digital heritage projects? What are the implications of such collaborations for heritage preservation and sustainable development?
Submission
• Closing date of submission window: 5th July 2022
• Scheduled publication date: May 2023
• Full papers should be submitted through the JCHMSD ScholarOne Manuscripts and will be
subject to the peer review procedures. Please register and access:
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jchmsd
• Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jchmsd?_ga=2.208294416.383106498.164 4286268-775555333.1612172152#author-guidelines
Design/methodology/approach: We designed a big data architecture and deployed Node.JS agents for scraping the Amazon.com pages using asynchronous Input/Output calls. The completed web crawling and scraping datasets were then preprocessed for sentimental and neural network analysis. The neural network was employed to examine which variables in our study are important predictors of product sales.
Findings: This study found that although online reviews, online promotional strategies and online sentiments can all predict product sales, some variables are more important predictors than others. We found that the interplay effects of these variables become more important variables than the individual variables themselves. For example, online volume interactions with sentiments and discounts are more important than the individual predictors of discounts, sentiments or online volume.
Originality/value: This study designed big data architecture, in combination with sentimental and neural network analysis that can facilitate future business research for predicting product sales in an online environment. This study also employed a predictive analytic approach (e.g. neural network) to examine the variables, and this approach is useful for future data analysis in a big data environment where prediction can have more practical implications than significance testing. This study also examined the interplay between online reviews, sentiments and promotional strategies, which up to now have mostly been examined individually in previous studies.
Design/methodology/approach – The research presented here adopts a Big Data methodological approach for mapping user-generated contents in social media. The methodology and algorithms presented are generic, and can be applied to diverse types of social media or user-generated contents involving user interactions, such as within blogs, comments in product pages and other forms of media, so long as a formal data structure proposed here can be constructed.
Findings – The limited presentation of the sequential nature of content listings within social media and Web 2.0 pages, as viewed on Web browsers or on mobile devices, do not necessarily reveal nor make obvious an unknown nature of the medium; that every participant, from content producers, to consumers, to followers and subscribers, including the contents they produce or subscribed to, are intrinsically connected in a hidden but massive network. Such networks when mapped, could be quantitatively analysed using social network analysis (e.g., centralities), and the semantics and sentiments could equally reveal valuable information with appropriate analytics. Yet that which is difficult is the traditional approach of collecting, cleaning, collating and mapping such datasets into a sufficiently large sample of data that could yield important insights into the community structure and the directional, and polarity of interaction on diverse topics. This research solves this particular strand of problem.
Research limitations/implications – The automated mapping of extremely large networks involving hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, encapsulating high resolution and contextual information, over a long period of time could possibly assist in the proving or even disproving of theories. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the feasibility of using automated approaches for acquiring massive, connected datasets for academic inquiry in the social sciences.
Practical implications – The methods presented in this article, together with the Big Data architecture can assist individuals and institutions with a limited budget, with practical approaches in constructing social information landscapes. The software-hardware integrated architecture uses open source software, furthermore, the social information landscapes mapping algorithms are easy to implement.
Originality/value – The majority of research in the literature uses traditional approaches for collecting social networks data. Traditional approaches can be slow and tedious; they do not yield adequate sample size to be of significant value for research. Whilst traditional approaches collect only a small percentage of data, the original methods presented here are able to collect and collate entire datasets in social media due to the automated and scalable mapping techniques.
Design/methodology/approach – The research adopted Big Data methodological approaches in tracking user-generated contents over a series of months and mapped online Twitter interactions as a multimodal, longitudinal ‘social information landscape’. Centrality measures were employed to gauge the importance of particular user nodes within the complete network and time-series analysis were used to track ego centralities in order to see if this particular online communities were maintained by specific egos.
Findings – The case study shows that communities with distinct boundaries and memberships can form and exist within Twitter’s limited user content and sequential policies, which unlike other social media services, do not support formal groups, demonstrating the resilience of desperate online users when their ideology overcome social media limitations. Analysis in this article using social networks approaches also reveals that communities are formed and maintained from the bottom-up.
Research limitations/implications – The research data is based on a particular dataset which occurred within a specific time and space. However, due to the rapid, polarising group behaviour, growth, disintegration and decline of the online community, the dataset presents a ‘laboratory’ case from which many other online community can be compared with. It is highly possible that the case can be generalised to a broader range of communities and from which online community theories can be proved/disproved.
Practical implications – The article showed that particular group of egos with high activities, if removed, could entirely break the cohesiveness of the community. Conversely, strengthening such egos will reinforce the community strength. The questions mooted within the paper and the methodology outlined can potentially be applied in a variety of social science research areas. The contribution to the understanding of a complex social and political arena, as outlined in the paper, is a key example of such an application within an increasingly strategic research area and this will surely be applied and developed further by the computer science and security community.
Originality/value – The majority of researches that cover these domains have not focused on communities that are multimodal and longitudinal. This is mainly due to the challenges associated with the collection and analysis of continuous datasets that have high volume and velocity. Such datasets are therefore unexploited with regards to cyber-community research.
Visual Heritage: Digital Approaches in Heritage Science aimed at a broad academic and practice-led readership, which extends across many disciplines and will be of considerable value to scholars, practitioners, and students working within heritage and computer science at all levels. The content, which applies heritage science across two million years of cultural history will be appreciated by a general audience, as well as those wishing simply to explore the vast range of potential technical applications across all the disciplines represented in the book.
The special issue call submissions that provide a better understanding of how digital tools can be used for mobilising activities core to cultural heritage and within the process, engage both institutions and grassroots communities such as young people as stakeholders. The special issue aims to both address and reflects upon the myriad opportunities and challenges that the use of new technologies have raised in the process of preserving cultural heritage in Asia so as to leave a legacy for our new generation. Especially focusing on the young generation as important heritage stakeholders and to investigate their role in the articulation between heritage and sustainable development.
Questions for the special issue are included but not limited to:
What are the necessary social, economic, and political conditions for leveraging the power of digital technology that can engage with the younger generations? What are the limits of audience interaction and participation in the digitalization of cultural heritage? How do young generations interact with cultural heritage within virtual and physical spaces? What can we do to empower and facilitate cooperation between governments, cultural and academic institutions in a way that engages with the young generations in digital heritage projects? What are the implications of such collaborations for heritage preservation and sustainable development?
Submission
• Closing date of submission window: 5th July 2022
• Scheduled publication date: May 2023
• Full papers should be submitted through the JCHMSD ScholarOne Manuscripts and will be
subject to the peer review procedures. Please register and access:
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jchmsd
• Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jchmsd?_ga=2.208294416.383106498.164 4286268-775555333.1612172152#author-guidelines
Design/methodology/approach: We designed a big data architecture and deployed Node.JS agents for scraping the Amazon.com pages using asynchronous Input/Output calls. The completed web crawling and scraping datasets were then preprocessed for sentimental and neural network analysis. The neural network was employed to examine which variables in our study are important predictors of product sales.
Findings: This study found that although online reviews, online promotional strategies and online sentiments can all predict product sales, some variables are more important predictors than others. We found that the interplay effects of these variables become more important variables than the individual variables themselves. For example, online volume interactions with sentiments and discounts are more important than the individual predictors of discounts, sentiments or online volume.
Originality/value: This study designed big data architecture, in combination with sentimental and neural network analysis that can facilitate future business research for predicting product sales in an online environment. This study also employed a predictive analytic approach (e.g. neural network) to examine the variables, and this approach is useful for future data analysis in a big data environment where prediction can have more practical implications than significance testing. This study also examined the interplay between online reviews, sentiments and promotional strategies, which up to now have mostly been examined individually in previous studies.
Design/methodology/approach – The research presented here adopts a Big Data methodological approach for mapping user-generated contents in social media. The methodology and algorithms presented are generic, and can be applied to diverse types of social media or user-generated contents involving user interactions, such as within blogs, comments in product pages and other forms of media, so long as a formal data structure proposed here can be constructed.
Findings – The limited presentation of the sequential nature of content listings within social media and Web 2.0 pages, as viewed on Web browsers or on mobile devices, do not necessarily reveal nor make obvious an unknown nature of the medium; that every participant, from content producers, to consumers, to followers and subscribers, including the contents they produce or subscribed to, are intrinsically connected in a hidden but massive network. Such networks when mapped, could be quantitatively analysed using social network analysis (e.g., centralities), and the semantics and sentiments could equally reveal valuable information with appropriate analytics. Yet that which is difficult is the traditional approach of collecting, cleaning, collating and mapping such datasets into a sufficiently large sample of data that could yield important insights into the community structure and the directional, and polarity of interaction on diverse topics. This research solves this particular strand of problem.
Research limitations/implications – The automated mapping of extremely large networks involving hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, encapsulating high resolution and contextual information, over a long period of time could possibly assist in the proving or even disproving of theories. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the feasibility of using automated approaches for acquiring massive, connected datasets for academic inquiry in the social sciences.
Practical implications – The methods presented in this article, together with the Big Data architecture can assist individuals and institutions with a limited budget, with practical approaches in constructing social information landscapes. The software-hardware integrated architecture uses open source software, furthermore, the social information landscapes mapping algorithms are easy to implement.
Originality/value – The majority of research in the literature uses traditional approaches for collecting social networks data. Traditional approaches can be slow and tedious; they do not yield adequate sample size to be of significant value for research. Whilst traditional approaches collect only a small percentage of data, the original methods presented here are able to collect and collate entire datasets in social media due to the automated and scalable mapping techniques.
Design/methodology/approach – The research adopted Big Data methodological approaches in tracking user-generated contents over a series of months and mapped online Twitter interactions as a multimodal, longitudinal ‘social information landscape’. Centrality measures were employed to gauge the importance of particular user nodes within the complete network and time-series analysis were used to track ego centralities in order to see if this particular online communities were maintained by specific egos.
Findings – The case study shows that communities with distinct boundaries and memberships can form and exist within Twitter’s limited user content and sequential policies, which unlike other social media services, do not support formal groups, demonstrating the resilience of desperate online users when their ideology overcome social media limitations. Analysis in this article using social networks approaches also reveals that communities are formed and maintained from the bottom-up.
Research limitations/implications – The research data is based on a particular dataset which occurred within a specific time and space. However, due to the rapid, polarising group behaviour, growth, disintegration and decline of the online community, the dataset presents a ‘laboratory’ case from which many other online community can be compared with. It is highly possible that the case can be generalised to a broader range of communities and from which online community theories can be proved/disproved.
Practical implications – The article showed that particular group of egos with high activities, if removed, could entirely break the cohesiveness of the community. Conversely, strengthening such egos will reinforce the community strength. The questions mooted within the paper and the methodology outlined can potentially be applied in a variety of social science research areas. The contribution to the understanding of a complex social and political arena, as outlined in the paper, is a key example of such an application within an increasingly strategic research area and this will surely be applied and developed further by the computer science and security community.
Originality/value – The majority of researches that cover these domains have not focused on communities that are multimodal and longitudinal. This is mainly due to the challenges associated with the collection and analysis of continuous datasets that have high volume and velocity. Such datasets are therefore unexploited with regards to cyber-community research.
the wealth of knowledge contained within this book illustrates how digital approaches in Heritage Science continue to drive forward innovations at scale that contribute highly visual and arresting contents, delivering new findings that transform our understanding of the past and ultimately make it more accessible to varied audiences.
This book is aimed at a very broad academic and practice-led readership, which extends across many disciplines and will be of considerable value to students at all levels working across heritage and computer science. The content will be appreciated by a generalist audience as well as those wishing to explore the vast range of potential, technical applications. The case studies presented here are international and have a global reach across a range of diverse topics. Examining digital technologies with a goal to preserve cultural and natural heritage at a global level and in the face of previously unimaginable threats from climate change, through fake news to catastrophic insurrection
The chapters contained within this volume present a broad range of technologies for capturing data (such as high-definition laser scanning survey and geophysical survey), modelling (including GIS, data fusion, agent-based modelling), and engaging with heritage through novel digital interfaces (mobile technologies and the use of multi-touch interfaces in public spaces). The case studies presented include sites, landscapes and buildings from across Europe, North and Central America, and collections relating to the ancient civilisations of the Middle East and North Africa. The chronological span is immense, extending from the end of the last ice age through to the twentieth century.
These case studies reveal new ways of approaching heritage using digital tools, whether from the perspective of interrogating historical textual data, or through the applications of complexity theory and the modelling of agents and behaviours. Beyond the data itself, Visual Heritage in the Digital Age also presents fresh ways of thinking about digital heritage. It explores more theoretical perspectives concerning the role of digital data and the challenges that are presented in terms of its management and preservation.
While Marcel Duchamp offered the art world one of the most complex and formative pieces of art ever, initiating the shift of values from aesthetics to idea, Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution, the ‘big’ idea of survivability through adaptation. Shift-Life was created as part of the national Darwin 200 project for the international bicentenary in 2009. It is a complex system of virtual life-forms struggling to survive in an environment made volatile through human interaction. Central to this installation work is the artificial life ecosystem as a self-sustaining, self-reproducing equilibrium of creatures and plants living in it. The general behaviour of each organism was more sophisticated than for the Duchampian creatures in that they were equipped for survival strategies and the reproduction of progenies. An exposition of the Shift-Life program is therefore presented followed by reflection on both projects and future directions for this collaborative research where potential emergent behaviours are concerned.
Palaeolandscapes Project (NSPP), the Lost Frontiers project seeks to go beyond the maps generated by that ground-breaking research. Led by researchers in the fields of archaeogeophysics, molecular biology and computer simulation, the project seeks to develop a new paradigm for the study of past environments, ecological change and the transition between hunter gathering societies and farming in North West Europe.
Following from earlier work, the project will seek to release the full potential of the available seismic reflectance data sets to generate topographical maps of the whole of early Holocene Doggerland that
are as accurate and complete as possible. Using these data, the study will then reconstruct and simulate the emerging palaeoenvironments of Doggerland using conventional palaeoenvironmental data, as well as ancient DNA extracted directly from sediment cores along the routes of two submerged river valleys. Using this base data, the project aims to transform our understanding of the colonisation of the North Sea
Under the broad title of Heritage Science, this aims to look at the role of digital technologies in preserving cultural and natural heritage at a global level the face of previously unimaginable threats: from climate change, through fake news to catastrophic insurrection.
The relevant disciplines listed below will form the themes of the volume:
• Heritage Science and Technology – definition and trends
• Modelling Past Environments – understanding the past
• Digital and Virtual Heritage Research and Applications – machine-facilitated heritage and human-machine-interfaces
• Crowd-sourcing and Democratisation of Digital Heritage
• Cultural and Creative Industries – societal and economic value
Interested? Want to submit a paper? Have a look at the attached PDF or contact the editor of your choice!
Professor Eugene Ch’ng FHEA
NVIDIA Joint-Lab on Mixed Reality, NVIDIA Technology Centre
University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Email: eugene.chng@nottingham.edu.cn
Professor Henry Chapman FSA
Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Email: h.chapman@bham.ac.uk
Professor Vincent Gaffney MBE FSA
School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences
Bradford, UK
Email: v.gaffney@bradford.ac.uk
Professor Andrew S. Wilson MCIfA, FHEA
School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences
Bradford, UK
Email: A.S.Wilson2@bradford.ac.uk
As with the first set of cores the new samples again yielded exceptionally well preserved material which featured numerous peat deposits, laminated organic clays and a full sequence documenting the marine inundation of Doggerland.
All the remaining parts of the 2 sets of cores have now been moved to the new cold stores at the University of Wales in preparation for further sampling by Dr Martin Bates and analysis at the University of Birmingham by Dr David Smith. A full programme of study including palynology and palaeoentomology will now take place along with a separate programme of radiocarbon (C14) dating. More to follow very soon!
VSMM2017 will explore ground-breaking applications of new media, VR, sensing, and imaging in creative societies. Some 30 years after the dawn of VR, with a new boom in virtual devices, products and applications, it is an apt moment to look “Back to the Future” and examine the potentials and pitfalls of VR, AR and 3D technologies. With virtual and 3D technology entering health to tourism, games to manufacturing, and art to entertainment, deep issues and questions arise.
The Conference will bring together researchers and academics, creative industry professionals and technologists, futurists and students to explore where virtual and 3D technologies have been and are taking us. Experts in the arts and culture, heritage and museums, design and engineering, architecture and planning, health and inclusion, and computing and digital systems are invited to gather to present, discuss, debate and learn.
Conference Website: http://www.vsmm.org
Submit here: http://vsmm.org/for-submitters/paper-submission-2/
VSMM 2017 Organising Committee
Royal Society
Chicheley Hall
May 15-16 2017
The Royal Society are hosting a Theo Murphy international scientific meeting on the implications of current research on marine palaeolandscapes. “Lost and Future Worlds: Marine palaeolandscapes and the historic impact of long-term climate change” has been organised by Professor Vincent Gaffney, Professor Geoff Bailey, Dr Richard Bates, Dr Philip Murgatroyd, Dr Eugene Ch’ng and Professor Robin G. Allaby the meeting will be held the Royal Society at conference centre at Chicheley Hall, Buckinghamshire (https://goo.gl/jgO5Ri), between
Monday 15 May – Tuesday 16 May.
Global warming following the last glacial maximum led to the global submergence of vast, populated landscapes. These largely unexplored lands hold a unique record of habitation linked to climate change. Frequently inaccessible, and unamenable to conventional analysis, this meeting brings together experts across historical and scientific disciplines to identify new analytical methods and the contemporary relevance of these lost lands.
Information on the meeting is held at https://goo.gl/nXtwS7
A t programme (PDF) is available to download at ...
https://royalsociety.org/~/media/events/2017/05/climate-change/Programme%20draft%206.pdf?la=en-GB
This residential conference is free to attend!
Advanced registration is essential (please request an invitation from https://goo.gl/nDjGbR
Catering and accommodation are available to purchase during registration
Poster session
There will be a poster session at 17:00 on Monday 15 May 2017. If you would like to apply to present a poster please submit your proposed title, abstract (not more than 200 words and in third person), author list, name of the proposed presenter and institution to the Scientific Programmes team no later than Monday 3 April 2017.
Please note that places are limited and are selected at the scientific organisers discretion. Poster abstracts will only be considered if the presenter is registered to attend the meeting.
see also https://lostfrontiers.teamapp.com/
Summary report on research 2016-2017
Europe's Lost Frontiers is a 5 year research project (2015 - 2020), funded by the European Research Council, and brings together experts from the fields of archaeology, geophysics, molecular biology and computer simulation to explore these lost landscapes. The project aims to study how the communities of the great plains reacted to climate change and the encroaching sea, as well as seeking clues to how these communities responded to the introduction of farming and the decline of hunter-gatherer societies